Monday, December 10, 2001

How about this item --- a pamphlet discussing accusations of
censorship and Noam Chomsky. More precisely, a pamphlet alleging
censorship by Noam Chomsky.

Do you think that Chomsky is a radical on the fringe left? The
Spartacist Youth Clubs are here to tell you that you are mistaken!
Their recent pamphlet, "Noam Chomsky: Radical Impostor, Anti-Communist
Censor", reveals the repugnant truth:

Like the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Dr. Noam Chomsky of MIT is not
really what he pretends to be.
Whatever Chomsky's radical rhetoric, he's nothing more
than a liberal anti-Communist.

Imagine.

This feud goes back to at least May, 2000, when the Sparts published
another leaflet, engagingly titled "Noam Chomsky: Imperialism's
'Armchair Anarchist'", slagging Chomsky because he fails to recognize
the self-evident need for a Leninist revolution to overturn the
insane, criminal, imperialist, capitalist world order. What's worse,
he won't let them give long speeches explaining his error during the
Q&A period of his lectures (which they coyly misconstrue as
a "discussion period"), instead "stamped[ing] his followers into
voting against our right to speak," thus preventing them from peddling
their wares to the "students on campus --- particularly black,
immigrant and working-class students --- who actually do burn with a
hatred for the brutality of U.S. imperialism and are looking for a
revolutionary alternative".

(In case that last part is a bit ambiguous, they clarify: "The
Spartacist League ... looks to the example of the 1917 Bolshevik
revolution.... Although deformed by unrelenting imperialist pressure
and undermined through Stalinist bureaucratic misleadership, for more
than 70 years the Soviet Union continued to embody gains for the
working class internationally." And North Korea's still doing it
today!)

When I first encountered these loons, nearly twenty years ago,
carrying signs outside my school's freshman dining hall explaining how
their cause du jour required handing the United States on a plate to
the Communist International, my instant response was, "oh, gee, a CIA front trying to discredit the left."

So, if Chomsky's analysis of recent events seems a little disjointed,
remember he's been harassed by these nitwits for at least a year and a
half, and make allowances...